In his latest essay in The Christian Century, Gordon Atkinson explains why we need both science and mystery. As usual, Gordon expresses my sentiments more eloquently than I ever could:

Some people see the boundary between mystery and science as a battleground with barbed wire and trenches on either side. But I think that the place where our searching and empirical minds meet the mysteries of the world is the realm of worship and poetry. Before Adam and Eve, the world was chaos, like a vast unconscious mind with no boundaries and no definitions. The world itself hasn’t changed, but our human perspective is continually solving mysteries and creating new ones as fast as we can.
Our love of answers has always been nicely balanced against our penchant for awe and worship. Reality is both a thing to be conquered and also something to be worshiped. This is the human way.
I wonder when it was that science and religion stopped seeing each other as ancient twins of the human mind and started seeing each other as competitors. While I and others like me slog it out in the worshiping world of mystery, brother scientist is observing, collating and solving mysteries as fast as he can. I don’t want him to stop. I like the way he slays ancient gods. What I want is for us to embrace each other and walk though life together. He can solve old mysteries and I can celebrate the new ones.

In an article in the International Herald Tribune, psychology professor Richard A. Friedman questions conventional wisdom about the midlife crisis. In regard to one story that he shares, he comments:

It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see that [this woman’s] husband wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But this hardly deserves the dignity of a label like “midlife crisis.” It sounds more like a search for novelty and thrill than for self-knowledge.
In fact, the more I learned about her husband, it became clear that he had always been a self-centered guy who fretted about his lost vigor and was acutely sensitive to disappointment. This was a garden-variety case of a middle-aged narcissist grappling with the biggest insult he had ever faced: getting older.
But you have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”

Midlife is a drag, but that’s just the way it is. People sometimes look at my with mild disbelief when I say that my wants are secondary to those of my family and that my primary role at this point in my life is to provide for them (not just financially). But Dr. Friedman also cites a survey in which only a small percentage of middle aged people reported having or having had a midlife crisis.
(via Follow Me Here)

This is a video that some coworkers and I created for a company short video contest (I’m ‘Waterfall’, if you don’t know me)

Today, a coworker who has young children was explaining to a childless coworker how Build-A-Bear works. This reminded me. I’m surprised that wacko right-wing Christians haven’t started a campaign against Build-A-Bear (I didn’t find any such thing on the Google).
In the process of making a stuffed animal at Build-A-Bear, the child does the following:

You select a heart – a Build-A-Bear Workshop trademark. Then you warm it in the palm of your hands, make a wish, and put it inside your new furry friend. This magical moment brings your furry friend to life and creates an unforgettable memory.

Sounds an awful lot like playing God to me.

I use Gmail for my personal email and Outlook 2003 at work.
Once I’d been using Gmail for a while, I started displaying my work mail in Outlook by conversation, which is somewhat similar to Gmail. One difference, however, is that in Outlook sent emails are not added to the conversation, only received ones. So, at work I still find myself frequently digging through my ‘Sent Items’ folder to find emails that I contributed to an email thread.
In Gmail, I use tags for organizing my email. At work, I organize my email by putting it into folders. But in Outlook, if a new reply comes in for a conversation that I’ve moved to a folder, the reply goes to my Inbox and is not displayed with its entire conversation until I move it to the same folder. Frustrating.

I was wondering… If you post a daily photo of your dog on your blog, and the advertising revenue from said blog is your primary income, can you write off care and feeding of said dog as a business expense?

Former NBC news reporter John Hockenberry offers a long commentary on why network news has failed the American public. It’s an interesting, though unsurprising, read. One of his main points:

Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone’s lost kitty.

This blog entry, How to Improve your Skills at Office Politics, contains some very good advice for being successful at work, though I take issues with the author’s choice of the term ‘office politics.’ To me, that term has very negative connotations.
I’ve been thinking about these tips in regard to working in software quality assurance. One of the toughest office dynamics is between experienced, alpha geek developers and more junior and/or less technically skilled quality assurance engineers. As a QA lead, I spend a lot of my time helping both sides to bridge this gap.
One of the best skills a junior QA engineer can develop is knowing when and how to ask for help: before you ask a developer for help, make sure you’ve tried everything possible to figure it out or find out for yourself, and when you do ask for help, explain what steps you’ve taken. This explanation helps the developer to understand what you do and don’t know, but more importantly, it shows him that you’re taking initiative and not wasting his time by running to him first (I’m consciously using the male pronoun here, since such alpha developers are usually male).
I had one QA engineer who was having a particularly tough time gaining credibility with a senior developer on her team. Despite employing the tactics above, the developer was still giving the QA engineer the impression that she was annoying him. So I designated myself her safe go-to person. After trying everything she could think of, she would come to me without worrying about her credibility.
If I could help her, then she didn’t have to go the developer. If I couldn’t help her, then she didn’t have to go to the developer. If I couldn’t help, then I reinforced to the developer that she had taken a lot of initiative, and helped him to understand what she did and did know.

This just makes my head hurt.

We certainly view our pets as much like kids as anybody, but when it comes to pet health care, my country upbringing reveals itself. Lately, we’ve been grappling with the high cost of veterinary care. We like our current vet a lot, but we feel like he prescribes optional services without informing us that they aren’t absolutely necessary. Today, I found an article on Slate about this very subject:

It’s just that if we’re coming to the point that we think of our pet’s health in the same way we do our own, I wish the vets I see would treat my pets more the way our doctors treat us. For example, over the years the pediatrician has heard a mild heart murmur when she has examined my daughter. But since my daughter is obviously in excellent health, the pediatrician has reassured me it’s nothing to worry about. But when the veterinarian detected a mild heart murmur in one of my cats, she immediately recommended I make an appointment with the veterinary cardiologist. What would happen to the cat if I didn’t do that? I asked. She had to acknowledge: probably nothing, but the echocardiogram only cost $300, and since my cat was a member of my family, surely I would want to do everything.